From the course: ZBrush: 3D Printing

Using the 3D Print Exporter - ZBrush Tutorial

From the course: ZBrush: 3D Printing

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Using the 3D Print Exporter

“

For the models that don't need to be hollow or that don't have color, you're ready to export for printing at this point. Let's take a look at the 3D Print Exporter and how it can help us get the model out of ZBrush and into reality. Now, this is for non-color printing. So, let's turn off the colors so that we get a better sense of what this is going to look like. Let's go into the Polypaint sub menu and turn off Colorize. Okay. Now we're ready to get on with exporting. To do that let's go up to Z plugin and turn on 3D Print Exporter. So in here we get a little preview of the size that it's going to export. However, you can see it doesn't quite have the size loaded in yet. It's all 3.5. So let's go ahead and click Update Size Ratios. And we just have to go back into this so we can see it again. Now I want to export in millimeters, so let's go ahead and switch this from inches to millimeters, and you can see in here that it's reporting a height of a little over a hundred. Now this is not what I'm expecting, let me show you why. Let me go into one of my Transpose Measurement tools here and just drag out a measurement from top to bottom. You can see here, I'm getting 38 centimeters. And then in the size sub-palette of the Geometry palette, we can see in here that the height is indeed 40. And that's 40 centimeters. So what I should be seeing in the 3D Print Exporter is 400 millimeters because millimeters is 10 times centimeters. Now this is just a little bug. So what I want to do is hit Update Size ratios one more time. And that should fix it. Now because I want to export in millimeters, we actually need to change this from 40 to 400. So I'm just going to click on that and type in 400 and hit Enter. The next setting in the 3D Print Exporter is whether I want to export all the sub-tools, just the visible sub-tools, or just the one selected sub-tool. Now this is actually another bug in the 3D Print Exporter. I've had instances where I had separate sub-tools and I clicked All and it actually left out some of the sub-tools. So for that reason, I like to make sure that all of my sub-tools are merged into one, and then I turn it to Selected. Now to finalize this, we need to click on the format that we want to export to. For non-color prints, I like to pick the STL format. It's a very common format. Every 3D printer should be able to load it. So let's click STL. And now we just need to find a place to save it to. I want to save it to the desktop. And let's give it a name, like Howard, and then I always like to put the unit of measurement and the height into my file name. So let's name this Howard 400 MM Tall and save. And that's it. The file is made and it can be loaded in to any 3D printer.

Contents